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The story
A clip from Fuji TV’s hit variety show “Mecha×2 Ike-teru!” has resurfaced and gone viral on overseas social media 13 years after it first aired. Extreme stunts — including kicking an idol in the head — are spreading alongside criticism like “Is this normal in Japan?” and “This is crazy,” and backlash against the cast is intensifying. On 5ch, reactions ranged from the scene of an AKB48 member being kicked, to the later revelation that the entire show was scripted, to similarly extreme segments from Tunnels and Nippon TV around the same era, with some raising the question of whether it’s fair to judge the past by today’s ethical standards.
September 3, 2026, 9:24 PM
Old TV footage suddenly blowing up on social media is nothing new — and this time, the target is the once-hit Fuji TV variety show “Mecha×2 Ike-teru!”
It’s not unusual for clipped scenes from old variety shows to rack up millions, even tens of millions, of views on social media. Nostalgic highlights and shocking moments spread easily, and posts apparently aimed at farming impressions keep popping up.
Source: news.livedoor.com / Original article here
What people said
That segment was never about being funny — it was about enjoying watching young women make pained faces, wasn't it?
foreigners should call that out too
Do you know how many people would kill for a spot like that one-in-tens-of-thousands seat, lol
every kind of harassment you can imagine was in there
Yeah, they went wild on middle schoolers
Kind of like the old "boiling-water commercial" bit
Bakuretsu Otousan caught plenty of flak back then too, if I remember right
to think people actually enjoyed watching this kind of assault
The dark part is they hid the fact that everything — down to every single reaction — was locked into the script when it aired, while touting themselves as "the Heisei-era Hyokin-zoku" (a legendary show famous for being totally freestyle and unscripted)
Wonder what changed — even movies stopped showing nudity around then
Nippon TV is gonna be in serious trouble lmao
Most of Nippon TV's hidden-camera prank show was staged —
the UFO/alien stuff, the psychic powers stuff, all of it
no matter how trashy the Fuji variety team and cast were back then
People were already saying that back then
But the important question is whose ethical standards those were at the time
in the end none of them could beat Tunnels' shows
Same thing. All of them were tasteless
Mecha-Ike broke through the 30% ratings wall that Tunnels could never clear no matter what they tried, and Ishibashi actually praised them for it
Twitter was already around back then, not just 2channel
Didn't it cause an uproar at the time?
It did blow up back then too — that's why they later did a follow-up skit where Mayuyu got to beat up Kato in return
Background and Talking Points
“Mecha×2 Ike-teru!” was a popular Fuji TV variety show that aired from 1996 to 2018, and the clip now circulating appears to be from around 2013 — roughly 13 years before this backlash. In recent years, it’s been noted that clips isolating only the most extreme moments from old shows tend to rack up views for the sake of farming impressions on social media, and this controversy fits that same pattern. Opinions in the thread were split over whether such stunts can be excused as simply reflecting “the ethical standards of the time,” especially since it later came out that even the cast’s reactions were scripted — a wrinkle that makes “it was a different era” too simple an answer. The thread also contained some unverified posts about a specific celebrity’s private life, but since these could not be substantiated, this article does not cover them.
*This article was compiled by excerpting and summarizing the 5ch (Entertainment/Sports News+) thread ““Is this normal in Japan?” “This is crazy” — 13-Year-Old Mecha-Ike Clip Spreads Overseas, Sparking Backlash Against Cast.”
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